


judas kiss

by angriff (refusals)



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Character Study, Community: snkkink, Dubious Consent, F/M, M/M, sad shifter trio feels, sex as self-harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-12
Updated: 2013-11-12
Packaged: 2018-01-01 06:02:51
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,284
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1041210
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/refusals/pseuds/angriff
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Failing salvation, there’s always redemption, but Annie refuses to continue being the whip he uses to flagellate himself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	judas kiss

**Author's Note:**

> for the [snkkink prompt](http://snkkink.dreamwidth.org/3666.html?thread=5028690#cmt5028690): Bertholdt gets satisfaction out of being abused. It may not be strictly sexual satisfaction, but he doesn't care. At first his partner (or partners) are willing to indulge him, but as time goes on they become increasing uncomfortable about the whole thing and start noticing his hidden intentions.
> 
> warnings for: self-harm, dubious consent, irresponsible practice of s/m activities, and basically unhealthy coping mechanisms all around. also for underage, though i like to imagine them as aged up to maybe 16-17 in this fic, since canonically they were barely into their teens when they were in training :/

In her dreams, they’re children again.  
  
They are supposed to be children still.  
  


* * *

  
She first notices it about six months into training when Bertholdt comes into the dining hall one morning with a slight hitch in his gait. They’d had the day off yesterday so it wasn’t an injury from sparring or a 3DMG mishap, plus he’d been fine when she’d seen him at dinner that evening, so she thinks she knows what this is about.  
  
She strides right over to where Reiner is already sitting at a table and she grabs the collar of his shirt as if he couldn’t just swat her away like a fly. Not that he ever would.  
  
Then again, she never thought he would hurt Bertholdt, either.  
  
“We need to talk,” she says. “In private.”  
  
Reiner laughs nervously, looking around at his comrades’ puzzled faces and trying figure out how to play this off. “It can’t wait?”  
  
It’s a futile question and he knows it, because she doesn’t even have to answer before he’s sighing and standing up to follow her to the least populated corner of the room, which is about as much privacy as they’ll get.  
  
“What did you do to Bertholdt?” she asks him without preamble.  
  
“Since when did you care?” he snaps back with an uncharacteristic bite to his tone, but it doesn’t match up with the guilt that’s softening his edges of his rugged features.  
  
“I don’t,” Annie lies. “But we have a fucking mission to carry out, and I’ll not be having him not making the top ten because you fucked him so hard he can’t do anything.”  
  
“He wanted me to,” Reiner insists, his face reddening slightly in embarrassment either at Annie’s crude words or the intimate nature of the information he’s disclosing, or both. “I didn’t want to, but he got mad, so I… I just… We both… But I mean, it’s not like he can’t take it, and I- I was doing what he wanted, right?”  
  
There’s a pleading note to his last word, like he’s desperately searching for some kind of confirmation that he’d done the right thing. Peace of mind is a luxury that no one has ever given Annie and she turned out just fine so she’s certainly not about to hand it away so freely to anybody else. Something’s just not adding up. It takes Annie a moment to realise what it is, and when she does, she lowers her voice even more and asks, “Why isn’t he… you know?”  
  
 _…healing?_  
  
Reiner casts a defeated-looking glance over at where Bertholdt has gingerly lowered himself into his seat and is halfheartedly spooning at his bowl of oatmeal.  
  
“I don’t know,” he says helplessly. “He… he says he likes to be able to feel it later. Like poking a bruise you got on the best day of your life.”  
  
“That’s… kind of fucked-up,” Annie tells him, suddenly feeling sick for some reason.  
  
Reiner raises his hands defensively. “Hey, I’m just repeating what he said to me.”  
  
“Whatever. Look, I don’t care what kind of weird shit you guys get up to in your spare time. But just don’t forget why we’re here.”  
  
“Of course not,” Reiner says immediately, giving Annie an odd look that only lasts a second before he breaks into a grin and playfully bops her on the shoulder. “Come on, Annie. Don’t be silly. How could I forget?”  
  


* * *

  
Reiner forgets.  
  
He drifts like the ocean in increasingly irregular tides as Bertholdt, his moon, struggles to reel him back in.  
  
Annie, meanwhile, prowls through her days with her father’s words a constant soundtrack playing on repeat, not letting her forget for a single moment.  
  
Sleep is the only merciful reprieve.  
  
In her dreams, they’re children again, except her father is teaching her about love, not fear, so maybe it’s someone else’s dream, or someone else’s father.  
  


* * *

  
Annie sees a lot by being invisible. People are less vigilant about keeping their guard up when they don’t think anyone’s paying attention. Reiner once good-naturedly likened both her and Bertholdt to flies on the wall. Bertholdt had given a meek laugh and not denied it, while Annie had noted this would only be an accurate comparison if flies could punch you in the face. Incidentally, Reiner never brought it up again.  
  
It’s never bothered her, though, being invisible. She likes the security it affords her, the ability to pass through people’s lives unnoticed even when she takes parts of them with her. Bertholdt, on the other hand, does not seem to appreciate it in the same way. She doesn’t understand why, but thinks it might have something to do with him always having lived in another person’s shadow, which Annie has never had to deal with – she’s always remained in the darkness by her own volition, never because she was being eclipsed by someone else.  
  
These days, however, the shadows don’t seem as safe as they used to. She sees certain things while being invisible that she wishes she could be blind to. She sees how much more often Bertholdt has to drop certain trigger words to bring Reiner back to them, and how much less often it seems to work. The little red half-moons in Bertholdt’s palms from where he’s constantly clenching his fists so hard his nails dig into his hands. The way Reiner no longer instinctively rests a protective hand against the back of Bertholdt’s neck as he always used to whenever he had an arm draped affectionately around Bertholdt’s shoulders.  
  
Once, during sparring, she ends up with her palm on Bertholdt’s chest and is shocked by the heat there, right over his heart, as though his Titan’s regenerative power is working on overdrive to heal something that’s breaking faster than it can be repaired.  
  


* * *

  
“Bertl has a crush on you,” Reiner tells Annie in an almost gleefully conspiratorial tone as they’re circling each other during one-on-one hand-to-hand combat training.  
  
“Bertholdt has a crush on  _you,”_  Annie reminds him, her chest tightening a little as she thinks about the sadness that is now an almost constant stamp on Bertholdt’s face, the way he touches Reiner more often and for longer, as though his hands could somehow draw Reiner back into their world.  
  
Reiner laughs like this is the most ridiculous thing he’s ever heard and Annie is really not in the mood for any of this so she quickly puts an end to it all by crouching low and bringing Reiner down with a swift sweep of her leg against the backs of his ankles.  
  


* * *

  
That evening at dinner, Annie tells Bertholdt to meet her at the top of the hill once everyone in his dorm is asleep.  
  
She waits there for a good half hour, drawing the hood of her sweatshirt above her head when the cold starts to get to her, but when it does nothing to warm her up, she thinks maybe the chill is coming from some place other than the night air. She places a hand over her chest, feeling for that steady pulse, that confirmation of life, that she is human despite the ice she feels running through her veins and the cold crystal nestled in her ribcage where there should be a meek, breakable heart.  
  
Her existential crisis is cut short by the sound of approaching footsteps and then Bertholdt is taking a seat next to her in the grass.  
  
“Thanks for coming,” Annie says awkwardly.  
  
Bertholdt apparently does not care for her clumsy attempts at pleasantries and just says tersely, “So I’m here. What’s this about?”  
  
It’s supposed to be about the mission. About how well Reiner has fallen into his role –  _too_  well, that is – and how to reverse that fall before it’s too late. It’s supposed to be about getting things done and getting out alive and finally getting to go home.  
  
Except instead of talking about any of this, somehow Annie just ends up saying, “It’s been a while since you and Reiner, huh.”  
  
Even as the words are dropping tactlessly out of her mouth, she doesn’t know where the hell they came from. Certainly not from what Reiner had told her earlier about Bertholdt’s alleged crush, and  _most_  certainly not from the curiosity the statement had piqued in her, because that’s not how things work. They aren’t blushing, giggling middle schoolers, they are death’s children,  _warriors,_  and they have sacrificed too much and received too little in return to fall prey to such frivolities anymore. Even though her fellow trainees are similar in the way that they are all far too young to have suffered so much, there is an extra dimension to the dissonance she feels, one that, unlike her peers, she cannot halve by sharing its burden with anyone else. It makes for terribly lonely days, burning both ends of the candle, and it always ends in darkness.  
  
Maybe that’s what this is, then. A desperate scramble towards light, regardless of the source. After all, Bertholdt is one of the mere two people she can be honest with, and with Reiner seemingly on the blink, Bertholdt is perhaps now the  _only_  one. Annie isn’t sure what she expects to get out of this fact, but it’s still a comfort even just knowing she isn’t necessarily going through this alone.  
  
She thinks back to when they were young – or young _er_ , at least, because for all intents and purposes they are still young, supposedly, except they aren’t at all, because Annie has come to learn that age isn’t always just in the years. Her memory has a lot of muddy spots, with whole chunks missing completely and others filled in with incidents that she’s not sure really happened, but one thing that has always stood out clear is how inseparable Bertholdt and Reiner have always been. With Berik, too, until he died, and in a way that just drove Bertholdt and Reiner closer together.  
  
Annie wonders what it’s like, both to care for someone that much and to have someone that cares for you in the same way. There had never been room for her in their little trio, which hadn’t bothered her at the time, so it’s irksome that it’s suddenly troubling her so much now. Maybe because back home she’d never had the chance to realise what she was missing but now, it’s everywhere she looks. It’s in the way that Mikasa works tirelessly to keep Eren’s stupidity from getting him killed, and how they both help Armin with his endurance training during their free periods. It’s in the way that Marco is the only one Jean lets call him out on his bullshit, it’s Franz and Hannah holding hands under the dinner table, and it’s Connie always setting aside the last bite of his meal for Sasha. Even that total asshole Ymir sneaks kisses on Krista’s cheek when she thinks nobody’s looking.  
  
Can Annie really blame Reiner for wanting to disappear into this world completely?  
  
She chances a glance to her side towards Bertholdt, who has suddenly become very interested in the patch of grass next to his boot.  
  
“Me and Reiner,” he repeats shakily, with a humourless smile. “Yeah. Yeah, I guess you could say it’s been a while.”  
  
His hand drifts up to touch the back of his neck, an action that blares like a warning siren to Annie but she’s not sure if Bertholdt is even aware he’s doing it so she says nothing, just continues to watch him from the corner of her eye.  
  
“I don’t see what this has to do with anything, though,” Bertholdt says after a moment, sounding a bit more sure of himself this time.  
  
“Because he doesn’t remember the two of you,” Annie says, choosing to ignore the way Bertholdt flinches. “It’s not just that he’s forgotten he’s a warrior or whatever, but it’s like… Like he’s rewritten his entire life.”  
  
“You think I don’t know that?” Bertholdt hisses in frustration. “You think I haven’t noticed that in his perfect world, he falls in love with a girl?”  
  
“Have you ever touched a girl before?” Annie asks him bluntly, not knowing where that came from either, because while she acknowledges the fact that Bertholdt is a good-looking guy, she's known him for so long that it had never really occurred to her to be attracted to him.  
  
He flushes a deep red, sweat beginning to bead on forehead and his upper lip, and simply shakes his head.  
  
Annie is suddenly hyperaware of the fact that she can hear both Bertholdt’s breathing and her own, and she says, “Do you want to?” and it’s _really_  fucking tacky but also oddly thrilling in a way that nothing seems to be anymore, except in her dreams, where they’re children again and the world is so bright and new.  
  


* * *

  
They don’t talk about it.  
  
They barely talk at all, actually, except for when they’re meeting on the hill. During the day their relationship remains just as it’s always been – a bit clipped and distant, but never overtly hostile, the way the moon pays no mind to the stars even when they outshine it. Annie is grateful for Bertholdt’s ability to compartmentalise in this way without ever letting one fragment overtake the other; she guesses that it is a large part of why he has been able to handle everything that Reiner has not.  
  
Under the cover of darkness is when they begrudgingly drop their defences. They never actually fuck, just rub and touch and lick and suck and tell each other things they've never told anyone else, and Annie comes to see a side of Bertholdt that she didn’t think existed – a Bertholdt who makes the first move and asks something of others and expresses his own needs.  
  
(It feels like such progress that it doesn’t occur to Annie until much later that what she had once taken for a different side of Bertholdt was not actually anything different at all, just an intensification of his usual character. Self-deprecation escalating into self-punishment. A passive want manifesting itself as an active drive.)  
  
Annie isn’t sure when Bertholdt’s satisfaction became such a priority of hers, but if there is anything she values, it’s the importance of being able to speak up for yourself, so when Bertholdt tells her to bite harder, scratch deeper, hold tighter, be meaner, she does.  
  


* * *

  
She never expected to think of what they do in this way, but it’s not long before she realises that she's having  _fun_. Plain and simple. A lot of what they do starts out as notably unsexy, but Annie doesn’t mind because those are the nights when she goes to sleep without an ache in her face from having had her lips permanently pulled back into a sneer. It doesn’t bother her if things are awkward or even embarrassing, because it just means they’re being the flustered, fumbling kids that she thought they could never be.  
  
When Bertholdt had first asked her to spank him, she hadn’t been able to do it without cracking up because of just how ridiculous it felt, him on his hands and knees in the dirt, ass in the air, waiting to be punished like some spoiled brat. He blushes when he comes too soon. She drools when she gives head and worries about her kissing technique and feels insecure about the size of her breasts. They both have very little idea what they’re doing or what any of it means. They've been taught to fight and maim and kill but never learned how to navigate their own bodies, their own passions.  
  
They could be children again, and she’s not even dreaming.  
  


* * *

  
They are behind the mess hall, her standing with her hands braced palm-flat against the walls, him seated on the ground, his back to the building. His face is between her thighs. Her breath stutters. She yanks at his hair in unforgiving fistfuls and calls him a dog.  
  


* * *

  
She would be lying if she said she did not enjoy the power trip. Despite her diminutive stature, she’s never felt small but she’s never quite felt big either, not even when she’s fourteen metres of pure exposed muscle. She thinks it must have a lot to do with the fact that regardless of how much physical space or strength she possesses, she never seems to feel any more in control. She may be able to crush a man between her thumb and index finger, but nothing in her life has ever truly been in her own hands. Even her Titan abilities, arguably her greatest instrument of power, are the result of a matter that she hadn’t had a say in.  
  
And so, she learned to carve out her own niches of control, or illusions of it, at least. The only freedom of choice she knows is the act of refusal. She lives her life through crimes of omission.  
  
But here, now, with Bertholdt, she finds she can finally exercise actual  _intent,_  and it’s the most electrifying thing she’s felt in a long, long time. She calls the shots, and takes them, too (on a reluctant promise on Bertholdt’s part that he will heal the bruises by morning). She wonders if perhaps she should be unsettled by just how satisfying she finds it to degrade and humiliate and  _hurt,_  as well as the fact that Bertholdt has expressed his gratitude to her by saying he doesn’t think anyone else could handle giving him what he needs. What the fuck does that say about her as a person, that she is able to stomach inflicting pain on someone who has done her no wrong, who she is supposed to care about? But she’s making someone happy, or some twisted version of it, which is more than she’s ever been able to give anyone, and that too is a bit of an exhilaration in and of itself.  
  
She does not understand that power doesn’t necessarily mean having someone else at your mercy, because that’s all it has ever entailed for her when she was on the other side of the equation, so it takes a while for her to realise that it was Bertholdt who held the power all along.  
  


* * *

  
They’ve broken into the storage building and he’s on his stomach on the floor, his body forming a loose triangle – back arched, neck craned upwards and legs bent up behind him as if trying to get his toes to touch his head. In a flagrant misuse of military equipment, his ankles are bound with maneuver gear wire that also extends to wrap itself around his throat, meaning he has to maintain his painful position otherwise the rope will go taut and cut off his oxygen. She hardens a single nail into crystal and drags it lazily down the long curve of his spine, watching the muscles beneath it jump and quiver and strain.  
  


* * *

  
Something has started to bother Annie ever since her little trysts with Bertholdt have become slightly more… intense.  
  
At first, when it was just slapping and biting and scratching, she understood. She’s always found the lingering hot tingle that came after a good smack in the face to be strangely pleasurable, so it was certainly reasonable to believe that this could be extrapolated on. It was all in good fun, after all. Perhaps, though this does venture into darker territory, she can even understand why he sometimes gets her to break the skin, because she’s felt the same urge to do so to herself on more than one occasion.  
  
But that’s the key difference – she would do it to  _herself._  Measured amounts of pain over which she has total control. To relinquish that control to someone else… it sounds like more of a nightmare than a wet dream. And even though Bertholdt has never given her any reason to think so, she still can’t help but wonder if there is any part of him that feels the same way.  
  
“Why do you like it?” she finally asks him one night, seated next to him on the grass of their favourite hill.  
  
His healing wounds are sizzling with a quiet hiss in the cool air and she knows that he knows what she’s talking about.  
  
“I don’t know,” he mumbles in what is perhaps the most unsatisfactory reply in history.   
  
She notices that he seems particularly embarrassed to be having this discussion, which angers her because if he’s okay with her grinding her heel between his legs until tears stream from his eyes then he should be okay with explaining why he likes it.  
  
“Are you saying you feel bad about it?” Bertholdt asks, seeming genuinely worried about her, which makes her feel nauseous. “It’s okay. Please. I don’t want you to feel bad.”  
  
“I don’t,” she lies, finding she doesn't have the heart to continue the conversation.  
  
In her dreams, her father is begging her to forgive him and she always does, because it’s never him or anyone else that’s the problem - it's that she’s just not so sure if she can she forgive herself.  
  


* * *

  
“It’s not like you’ll kill me,” Bertholdt is saying, like that’s the only thing that could possibly be troubling her about the request he’s making of her.  
  
That request being that she loop the straps of her maneuver gear around his neck and  _pull,_  until he stops breathing, stops being conscious, even.  
  
She fixes him with an expectant stare, waiting for him to offer a more convincing reason as to why she should do this, or at least some kind of acknowledgment about how fucked-up it is, but he just stares back at her, not seeming to understand.  
  
“That’s not the issue,” Annie eventually says, her tone fine-tuned to hide her distress by making it sound like exasperation. “So what, you’re gonna go out and do anything just because it won’t kill you? If you haven't noticed, that’s just about fucking  _everything_  short of decapitation.”  
  
“So what  _is_  the issue, then?” Bertholdt demands.  
  
Annie opens her mouth to respond but realises she doesn’t quite know what to say. Obviously Bertholdt finds nothing wrong with his own proposal, so why does she? He’s right that it won’t kill him, and in a way it’s not even that much different from anything else they’ve done to this point, none of which would have killed him either. So why is this where she draws the line?   
  
“Reiner didn’t mind,” Bertholdt mumbles, sounding like a petulant child that’s using one parent against the other to get what he wants.  
  
Any hint of sympathy that Annie might have had for Bertholdt disappears and she is fully aware of how cruel her next words will be when she scowls, “Then get Reiner to do it.”  
  
Sure enough, Bertholdt can’t hide the hurt in his voice when he says, “You  _know_  I can’t.”  
  
“Well, neither can I. I-I’m sorry. …I’m going back to my room.”  
  
She readjusts her bra underneath her shirt and walks away, suddenly cold again despite the trickle of sweat she can feel running down her stomach from the dip between her breasts, and the monster broiling in her blood.  
  


* * *

  
Annie waits for the next time that Reiner remembers. She needs him to remember so that she can talk to him about what happened between her and Bertholdt the other night and maybe figure out why it had felt so wrong. She watches Reiner carefully, watches Bertholdt watching him, then finally one evening at dinner she catches Reiner teasing the back of Bertholdt’s neck with his fingers the way he used to and she figures this is as good a chance as she’s going to get so she pounces on it.  
  
She asks Reiner to wait for her once he’s done eating and gets him to walk her back to the girls’ dorms.  
  
Neither tact nor tastefulness have ever been her forte, so she just plunges right in and says, “Bertholdt asked me to strangle him yesterday.”  
  
Reiner seems to choke a little despite not having anything in his mouth. “W-what?”  
  
“Did he ever ask you to do that?”  
  
“Fucking hell, Annie! You can’t just go around aski—”  
  
“Did. He. Ever. Ask you to do that.”  
  
Reiner closes his eyes and inhales sharply, running an anxious hand through his short-cropped hair before he finally admits, “Yeah. He did.”  
  
“And you did it.”  
  
“I did what he wanted!” Reiner insists, and he’s starting to sound a bit hysterical now, leading Annie to worry that she’s pushed him too far, but she can’t back down now. “You don’t understand, that’s what I  _have_  to do. It’s my  _job_  to look after Bertl. I… I fucked up once, and it… I can’t… I-I promised I wouldn’t let anyone down again.”  
  
Annie has always suspected that Reiner’s guilt over Berik’s death never really left him, and ended up manifesting itself in an almost compulsive need to protect those around him so that he’d never lose someone in that way again. What he’s just said has confirmed her suspicions, but in a sick way that she would much rather have been wrong about.  
  
“How the fuck does  _suffocating_  someone count as ‘looking after’ him?” she demands, and she almost feels guilty when Reiner cringes at the acid in her tone.  _Almost._  
  
Suddenly, however, the distress on his face seems to melt away and taking its place is the sloppy grin that Annie is all too used to seeing these days.  
  
“Come on, Annie,” he says cheerily. “I know I might nag Bertholdt a lot about training and eating well and being more assertive and stuff, but I’d hardly call that  _suffocating._  And it’s only because I want him to be the best soldier he can be. Sometimes he just needs that extra little push, you know?”  
  
Annie’s blood seems to freeze over in her veins, her circulation coming to an icy halt. Distractedly, she wonders how she can feel so cold all the time when her Titan is always crackling like a furnace just beneath the papery surface of her skin.  
  
“Bertl has a crush on you, you know,” Reiner says, and she knows this conversation is over.  
  


* * *

  
“Is Bertholdt mad at me?” Reiner asks Annie a few days later when it’s just the two of them cleaning out the stables.  
  
“Why do you say that?” she replies.  
  
He frowns, seeming a bit confused, like he’s just woken up from a too-long nap and has no idea whether it is night or day anymore. “I don’t know, I just… Things are different.  _He’s…_  different.”  
  
“He’s just sulking,” Annie says distantly, though it is more or less the truth. She hasn’t spoken to him much since the night she’d refused to choke him, and from what she’s seen, he hasn’t spoken much to Reiner either, or anyone, really – he’s mostly just been hanging back and looking vaguely morose.  
  
Reiner makes a noncommittal grunting noise in acknowledgment but Annie can tell he’s not satisfied with her pathetic explanation.  
  
They continue raking out the soiled hay in silence for several minutes until Reiner says, “Can I ask you a question?”  
  
“Doesn’t mean I’ll answer it,” is Annie’s careful reply.  
  
“Do you ever feel like…” His brows knit together as he struggles to find the right words, and when he does, they come out as the small, hiccuping syllables of a frightened child, so unlike his usual confident drawl that Annie can’t help but to wish she’d just told him to keep it to himself:  
  
“Do you ever feel like something you’re doing that is supposed to be helpful or the right thing is actually doing more harm than good?”  
  
Annie can’t help it; she  _laughs._  It’s harsh and viciously unhappy, all bared teeth and no smile, because Reiner has essentially just described _everything they’ve ever done_ , but she can’t be sure if she’s with the soldier or the warrior right now so she doesn’t know if he even has any idea what he’s talking about.  
  
“You-you’re gonna have to be a little more specific,” she finally wheezes once she’s caught her breath.  
  
Reiner fixes her with a pointed look but it quickly disintegrates into one of distress, and she realises that he’s lucid again. How cruel it seems, she thinks, that the only time she sees him truly comfortable and at ease is when he is being someone else, living someone else’s life.  
  
“You know, I actually feel bad about it sometimes?” he says, his grip tightening on the pitchfork he’s holding until white blooms in bumps of his knuckles. “I know I shouldn’t, but I… It’s just been getting so  _hard._  I remember the first conversation I had with Eren and Armin, and it was about their hometown, the one that  _I_  fucking—”  
  
“These people are not your friends,” Annie cuts in harshly. “You don’t need to feel bad for them. They want to kill you, remember? If they knew what you were, they would  _kill_  you.”  
  
“And how many have  _we_  killed, Annie?” Reiner says quietly.  
  
Annie presses her lips into a thin line and sounds a lot more confident than she feels when she replies firmly, “It’s not the same thing.”  
  
“So you’re saying you don’t feel even just the slightest bit of regret, then?”  
  
“…I didn’t say that.”  
  
Reiner seems to become noticeably more agitated at her words. “Fuck, Annie. We’re going to fail. We’re never going home.”  
  
“Whoa, hey, get it together. What makes you think that?”  
  
“Because you are the  _rock,_  Annie. I… I don’t tell anyone this, but sometimes I feel myself… slipping.”  
  
 _No fucking shit,_  Annie thinks, and would have said out loud, but Reiner looks so distraught that she can’t bring herself to. She wonders what must be going through his mind at times like these, when his two selves collide, like tectonic plates shifting against each other. She thinks the result must be pretty similar in terms of devastation.  
  
“But you’ve always known exactly what to do,” Reiner goes on. “You’ve never faltered, not once. Whenever I’d doubt myself, I’d see how much you believed in our mission and it would set me back on course… But now, if even  _you’re_  thinking…” He trails off, lost in painful thought.  
  
“What about Bertholdt?” Annie points out. “Really, he’s the one I’d say has done the most to… keep you on course. Even if I waver, there will always be Bertholdt.”  
  
She is surprised when Reiner just lets out a derisive snort. “Right. ‘Cause  _that guy_  is the poster boy for stability.”  
  
“Oi, pretty rich, coming from you.”  
  
“I don’t know, it’s just weird with him, you know?” Reiner frowns unexpectedly, as if he’d suddenly remembered something troubling. “He used to get all sad sometimes, so I had to help him. I was… helping him.”  
  
His voice is strange when he says that last part, like he’s reciting something he was told but doesn’t quite understand.  
  
Annie thinks back to Reiner explaining about Bertholdt’s best-day-of-your-life bruises, thinks about all the things Bertholdt has ever asked or let her do to him. She thinks about the way she sometimes wants to strike a match to her own flesh because there is too much going on inside of her and if she could just burn it all down then she could start all over again like a forest fire, and she realises with a sinking feeling in her gut that while Reiner may not understand, she certainly does, but she’s hoping to hell that there's some way she could be wrong.  
  


* * *

  
She tries to test out her theory as subtly as possible, knowing that if she says or does anything to tip Bertholdt off to her suspicions, he will do all he can to dispel them.  
  
“Do you ever feel bad about it?” she asks him one evening on their hill, not unlike Reiner’s question to her last week in the stables, and she knows that Bertholdt will understand what she’s talking about without her having to spell it out for him.  
  
Bertholdt lets out a nervous, halfhearted laugh. “Why do we always have to talk about heavy shit when we’re here?”  
  
“Is that a yes?” Annie presses.  
  
“Well, who  _wouldn’t_  feel bad about doing what we’ve done?” Bertholdt bursts out, sounding scared and over-defensive even though Annie hadn’t accused him of anything.  
  
“I guess we all do, then,” she mumbles, mostly to herself.  
  
Bertholdt looks over at her with an odd expression on his face. “Even you?”  
  
Annie throws her hands up in the air. “Why is everyone so surprised by this? And by ‘everyone’ I mean just you and Reiner, but really, how much of a heartless monster do you guys think I am?”  
  
“You just… seem to deal with it so much better than us,” Bertholdt says, then quickly corrects himself: “I mean, than Reiner.”  
  
“Literally  _anybody_  could deal with  _anything_  better than Reiner, so that doesn’t say much,” she points out dully.  
  
“Still… How do you do it?”  
  
There is an almost heartbreaking note of curiosity in his voice, as though he truly wants to know Annie’s secret, like this is his last hope at some kind of salvation.  
  
Failing salvation, there’s always redemption, but Annie refuses to continue being the whip he uses to flagellate himself.  
  
“Turning into crystal isn’t the only way I harden myself,” she says eventually, because the alternative is admitting that she really does not deal with it at all, that her real skill lies in how well she is able to hide it. “So what about you? How do you… you know?”  
  
He just gives another shaky laugh and replies, “I have you,” and it would be such a sweet, romantic thing to say if only Annie didn’t know perfectly well what he was really talking about.  
  


* * *

  
In one last desperate scramble to prove herself wrong about Bertholdt’s true motives, she corners him a few days later as they’re all returning to the grounds after having spent the afternoon in a nearby forest doing 3DMG exercises.  
  
“That first night on the hill,” she says, barely able to suppress the tremor in her voice. “I asked you if you’d ever touched a girl and you said no and I asked if you wanted to try. So you touched me. But I realised you never actually answered my question.”  
  
Bertholdt looks even more like a startled deer than usual and all he can muster up is a stammering, “W-what?”  
  
“I got you to touch me,” Annie repeats. “And you let me touch you. But did you really want it to happen?”  
  
Bertholdt seems to hunch into himself, trying to become smaller, probably wanting to disappear entirely. “Annie…”  
  
“And then when I asked you why you like being treated that way,” she ploughs on, unable to stop herself now, “You just told me not to feel bad. You didn’t say why you liked it.”  
  
“It’s… hard to explain,” is Bertholdt’s weak, halfhearted response.  
  
Annie is silent for a long time before she asks quietly, “Is it because you  _don’t_  like it, Bertholdt?”  
  
“No, no, no, it’s not like that,” he insists quickly, but stunningly unconvincingly. “Look, I know it seems fucked-up, but… Just take my word for it when I say that it helps, okay? Isn’t that a good enough reason?”  
  
It’s really not, but it  _is_  more than enough to tell Annie all she needs to know, so she abruptly ends the conversation and in her dreams they’re children again and don’t need a reason for doing anything.  
  


* * *

  
Bertholdt sneaks into the girls’ dorms that night, overflowing with bumbling apologies and clumsy kisses that Annie turns her head away from so that he only ever catches her cheek, her nose, her jaw, because she knows that if he manages to snag her by the mouth, she will let herself be reeled in like a thrashing trout at the end of a fishing line.  
  
They fuck for the first time right there in Annie’s bunk, with stuttering movements and smothered gasps escaping through bitten bottom lips despite their best efforts to keep as quiet as possible. The way they fit together is all wrong, they are fire and ice, he is all loose latitude and molten heat while she is tension and resentment and cold, and even though it hurts her a little at first, she says nothing, because at least for once she’s not having to hurt him.   
  
Reiner finds out about it somehow and gloats about having been right about everything until Annie socks him in the jaw.  
  


* * *

  
They don’t talk about it.  
  
There’s nothing to talk about. They’ll be graduating soon anyway, so they’ll be going their three separate ways as was originally planned, to have one mole in each faction of the military, though lately Bertholdt has been hinting that he might follow Reiner wherever he goes to be able to keep an eye on him.  
  
Annie is relieved that they had all agreed to let her be the one to infiltrate the Military Police. She has never made any effort to hide her intention to do so from her peers, because she doesn’t see why anyone should feel ashamed about wanting to survive, but these days she finds that her eagerness to escape into the inner walls involves more than just self-preservation: she is also looking forward to not having to lie anymore.  
  
The truth is, she’s just so  _tired._  Tired of keeping her defences up, tired of keeping everyone out. It’s exhausting to constantly be pretending she is a better person than she really is, but once she graduates, she will no longer have to maintain the charade.  
  
After all, she knows the kinds of people who join the Military Police. Corrupt interior city trash, comfortably apathetic bluebloods, snotty brats like Kirschtein.  
  
Self-serving cowards such as herself.  
  
(Marco's case is some weird anomaly that she does not expect to encounter again.)  
  
She will have very little trouble keeping to herself when surrounded by scum like that. She will be among her own kind.  
  
It’s been an entirely different scenario with her comrades from the 104th. While she won’t go so far as to call them  _friends_  per se, there is no denying that most of these people with whom she has spent the past three years have shown her nothing but kindness. Kindness that she not only knows she does not deserve, but also does not understand. She’d taken her father’s words to heart and treated the world as her enemy, acting preemptively on the expectation that she would be regarded as such as well. She made herself seem as cold and unapproachable as possible and waited for everyone to despise her the way she was told they would, and the way she knows they will once her true identity comes to light. It would feel like less of a betrayal that way, she thought, then wondered why she even cared about that.  
  
So she waited and waited and waited, but their hatred never came. No matter how much she scowled and snapped and sneered, Mina still saved a seat for her in the mess hall; Armin still told her fanciful stories about burning water and islands made of ice; Eren was still eager to have her help him improve his hand-to-hand combat form; and Marco still always noticed and asked if she was all right whenever she slipped into those moods where the sadness kept her mute for days at a time.  
  
These little things all spoke louder than the echo of her father’s ominous warnings. Though she had always considered his word to be the law, she can’t help but to wonder if perhaps she’s finally found something he was wrong about.  
  


* * *

  
She and Bertholdt are alone on their hill again, but at midday for once instead of in the dead of night, because with their training coming to a close, they’ve all been granted a lot more free time. Annie can’t quite believe that they’ve all made it this far, and undetected, no less. She thinks she’s done a pretty good job of remaining professional and unattached, all things considered. Bertholdt, too. She just wishes she could say the same for Reiner.  
  
“We graduate in a week,” Bertholdt says out of the blue, and it’s not a question or anything, so Annie doesn’t respond, then he adds, “You know what that means.”  
  
“Of course I do,” Annie replies, clipped and curt, unsure of why he feels the need to bring this up.  
  
“I’m going to do it,” Bertholdt says after a moment, his voice even smaller than before.  
  
Annie stiffens, the cold washing over her again. “All of it?”  
  
Bertholdt sets his jaw grimly and manages a tiny nod.  
  
“The inner gate is Reiner’s job,” she argues.  
  
Bertholdt grinds out an unhappy laugh. “And you really trust him to be able to do it, in the state he’s in?”  
  
He’s right, and they both know it. With Reiner out of commission and Annie unable to perform this particular task because her Titan lacks the necessary strength, it all comes down to Bertholdt to shoulder this burden alone.  
  
“Besides,” Bertholdt adds softly, “I was gonna offer to do it anyway. I don’t… Reiner’s already so fucked-up about this whole thing. I don’t want him to have to go through it again.”  
  
Annie feels an odd twinge ripple through that curious muscle inside her chest at the obvious show of devotion Bertholdt is still able to demonstrate towards someone who has caused him little more than anguish in recent times. She feels slightly guilty to admit that she is surprised to see just how far Bertholdt is willing to go to protect his friend. For as long as they’ve known each other, it’s always been Reiner who took on the role of the self-sacrificing guardian, not him.   
  
And not Annie, either, but right then she realises that she, too, would take either Reiner or Bertholdt’s place if she could – for  _their_  sakes, not just the sake of their mission as would have been her sole motivation not too long ago. That capacity to care that had always fascinated her so has revealed itself to exist in her after all, and she can’t tell if it comes as a terror or a relief. Probably both. Either way, she has no idea what to do about it.  
  
“You can’t do it,” she says helplessly, scrambling for any reason, any excuse at all that could spare Bertholdt from this additional suffering. “How the fuck are you going to make it from the outer gate to Wall Rose with your slow-ass Titan form?”  
  
Bertholdt shrugs, like he doesn’t care what happens to him, and the only reason he’s still going along with any of it is because he knows there is too much depending on him for him to just bow out. “I guess I’d just have to shift back and get there on 3DMG.”  
  
“Transforming twice within such a short period of time?” asks Annie doubtfully.  
  
“Yeah, so? You can do it just fine.”  
  
“I’m not a fucking sixty-metre-tall walking torch. It doesn’t take as much out of me.”  
  
“I can do it,” Bertholdt asserts.  
  
“And if you can’t?” Annie dares to ask.  
  
The utter crushing defeat in Bertholdt’s voice when he answers makes Annie shiver. “I… I don’t know. I don’t think I even care. Just… Just don’t bring Reiner back into it, okay? Let him be a soldier.”  
  
“Bertholdt…” she starts to say, not liking where this is going at all, but Bertholdt cuts her off before she can even get another word in.  
  
“Please, Annie,” he practically begs. “ _Please,_  just let Reiner forget.”  
  


* * *

  
Annie remembers how, after one of Eren’s many impassioned outbursts of Titan hatred, Reiner had nudged her in the ribs and whispered with a snicker, “He sure knows how to commit himself to a cause. Too bad he’s not one of us, eh?”  
  
Funny how things work out sometimes.  
  
She supposes this changes everything.  
  


* * *

  
If there was ever anything that Annie never expected death to be, it was a shock.  
  
When it comes down to it, death was the only thing she believed in, really. The one thing she could count on above all else. It would come for them all eventually, so even the most tragic or untimely death could hardly be called shocking in the grand scheme of things, plus her kind may be damn near indestructible but they're still not immortal.  
  
However, Trost is death at a frequency she did not know her callous ears were even capable of picking up. It is piercing and deafening and drowns out all other sound, all other feeling. She stumbles through the ruined streets in a near catatonic daze, as if her mind has been pushed past its capacity and shut down completely.  
  
At some point, Bertholdt hands her a set of bloodstained maneuver gear, cryptically telling her to hang on to it for later, and she doesn’t know what it’s for or where it came from but is too frazzled to think to ask.  
  
Her feet slip on blood-slickened cobblestone, decay flooding her nostrils even through the cloth covering her mouth and nose, and she does not understand why she is so shaken and jarred. It's not like this is anything new for her. She’d already been through all of this once before, at an even younger age than she is now, and she’d barely batted an eyelash. She’d descended upon humanity as one of three furies, maddened with hunger and purpose, an apocalypse child meant to flourish among the flames.  
  
She will never be a child again, not even in her dreams, which are full of ragged strips of loose hanging flesh and the stench of sun-bloated rotting meat.  
  


* * *

  
The night they throw the last of the corpses onto the funeral pyre, Annie and Bertholdt end up on the floor of some abandoned house, rutting their clothed, soiled bodies against each other in frenetic, rhythmless movements, and he doesn’t even have to say a word before she’s got both hands around his neck, mesmerised by the sensation of his throat spasming desperately against her grip, his jugular thrashing in a frantic pulse beneath her thumb as she wrings out everything she hates about the world and everything he hates about himself.  
  
Funny how things work out.  
  
Or don’t.  
  
She supposes this changes either everything or nothing at all.  
  


* * *

  
The following morning, Annie is horrified to see Bertholdt show up for breakfast with her handprints fingerpainted in blushing purple on his throat.  
  
She practically hauls him up out of his seat, drags him to the furthest corner of the room, and hisses, “What the fuck is that?”  
  
Bertholdt touches his neck with a delicate hand and gives an apathetic shrug. “I like the way it looks.”  
  
“It looks disgusting and awful, why the fuck would you want to look like this,” Annie bites out, except what she really means is that it makes  _her_ feel disgusting and awful, knowing that she’s the one who did this to him.  
  
“Well, I can’t get rid of it now because people have seen it already and it’d be weird if it just disappeared,” Bertholdt points out, and Annie could swear there is a hint of smugness in his voice that she wants to slap right out of him, but that’s probably what he’s trying to get her to do.  
  


* * *

  
After that, a lot happens in not a lot of time.  
  
Throughout the next couple of days, Annie discovers that she is not the only one who’s changed, which is simultaneously both a relief and a disappointment. On the one hand, it’s reassuring to know that she's not alone in being completely and utterly unable to handle what had just happened. But the fact that it’s a universal sentiment is also what makes it embarrassing for her; sure, everyone else may be traumatised and terrified and disillusioned, but she isn’t everyone else. She’s stronger, colder, tougher,  _better._  
  
Or so she thought.  
  
The blackness hangs over them all during their every waking and sleeping moment. It’s in each of the now-empty seats in the dining hall and the muffled sobs that seem to originate from a different bunk every night. It’s in all their dead eyes and dead friends and her dead dreams, where they’re dead children following dead ends.  
  
 _She did this to them._  
  
Bertholdt may have been the one to knock down the gate, but it was her rallying battle cry that had drawn all the Titans to the city. Without her, perhaps only a few of the malingering Titans closest to the walls would have made it through breach before it was sealed, assuming Eren would have still discovered his shifting ability in time.  
  
Annie touches her own neck, remembering how wrecked Bertholdt’s voice was after she’d finally released her punishing hold on his throat. It should have been the other way around, should have been her with her death-scream strangled mute, instead of the quiet boy who had never used his voice much to begin with.  
  


* * *

  
She is deliberately, explicitly gentle with him the next time he pulls her from her dorm with that all too familiar look of violent, visceral despair glazing over his eyes, the kind that she knows he wants her to slap or cut or bite or choke out of him.  
  
Not this time.  
  
It’s so maliciously satisfying, to know she is denying him something that he thought he could just coax out of her as he pleased, as if she’d never find out, as if she was all right with being used in this way.  
  
How odd it is, to have a revenge that is centred solely around tenderness and the refusal to hurt.  
  


* * *

  
Annie thinks she’s won, until the following morning when she has a total déjà vu upon seeing Bertholdt walking into the mess hall with rickety ginger movements, as though all his joints were gears that need oiling badly.  
  
Not again.  
  
She nudges Reiner with her elbow and whispers furiously, “What did you do to Bertholdt?” and it could be the scene from two years ago again, except for how everything and everyone has changed.  
  
Reiner gives her a funny look. “What do you mean?” He frowns, then asks, “Is he okay?”  
  
Confused, Annie glances over at Bertholdt, who is only a few feet away now and definitely knows what she’s up to, because he gives her a nearly imperceptible shake of his head. Reiner also eyes Bertholdt with puzzled concern as the taller boy takes a seat next to him. Now that Bertholdt is closer, Annie can see the beginnings of a bruise forming just below his right eye and the bite marks on his clavicle visible whenever he moves and the collar of his tunic shifts in a certain way.  
  
“Hey,” Reiner says to him, “Everything okay? You slept in and I know I should’ve woken you, but you just seemed so wiped.”  
  
“Yeah, Bertholdt,” Annie says coldly, “It’s almost as if you’d been up all night.”  
  
Bertholdt forces a feeble laugh. “You guys’re silly,” he says, and does not look up from his plate for the rest of his meal.  
  
He eats quickly and ducks out of the mess hall before Annie is done with her own breakfast, but he should know better than to think he could get away for long, because if Annie Leonhardt wants to find you, she will find you.  
  
Which she does, behind the boys’ barracks, where he’s running his bedsheets through the laundry wringer. She knows that he knows she’s here, but he’s hunched over his work intently, refusing to look up.  
  
“Fuck you,” she says as a greeting.  
  
He finally raises his head, and at first there’s panic in his eyes but some switch seems to go off inside him and suddenly it’s gone, replaced by a dull nothingness.  
  
“Hi,” he says, like this is just any other normal encounter, and it infuriates her for reasons that she can’t quite identify.  
  
“So what the fuck was that, huh?” she asks roughly. “You go off and find someone else after you were done with me? Someone who was fucked-up enough to indulge you in your own massive, enormous,  _colossal_  fucked-up’ness?”  
  
A harsh bark of laughter punches out of her at the unintentional pun while Bertholdt just casts a listless glance down at his laundry and says, “Blood is a bitch to get out of these sheets.”  
  


* * *

  
Towards the end of the day, after much seething and glowering, Annie comes to a decision. She tracks Bertholdt down again, offering to take Sasha’s turn on dishwashing duty after supper because she knows that Bertholdt is also scheduled for that chore. (Sasha eyes her suspiciously, wondering what Annie wants from her in return, and for a moment Annie thinks to exploit this but she can’t come up with anything to ask for. At least, nothing that Sasha could actually give her.)  
  
When Bertholdt sees it’s Annie who has come to join him in the kitchen, the soap-slippery plate he’s holding slips from his hands and lands in the basin with a loud clatter.  
  
“Now what?” he asks tiredly.  
  
Annie rolls up her sleeves and scrubs three bowls before she finally says, “You can come to me, okay?”  
  
“…What?”  
  
“Don’t go to anyone else,” Annie replies through clenched teeth, like it’s physically difficult for her to get the words out. “I’ll do whatever you want me to. Because I know you’re gonna keep being stupid regardless of whether or not I’m there, so if it’s gonna happen, then… I’d rather be there.”  
  
Like Sasha, Bertholdt studies Annie warily for quite some time, wondering what the catch is.  
  
The mission, she tells herself, slightly unnerved by the feeling of his eyes on her. It’s all for the mission. It’s not because she can’t stand the idea of someone else being able to access that part of him that only she and Reiner were privy to, or because she’s worried what that person might do to him, that they might go too far or actually enjoy hurting him. This decision she's made was formulated on pure logic, not heady, useless emotion. For the mission, she tells herself.  
  
“Thanks, I guess,” Bertholdt says uneasily after a moment, sounding like he isn't sure if he is saying something inappropriate. It certainly  _is_  an odd thing to be expressing gratitude for.  
  
“I’m not doing this for you,” Annie grinds out, hoping he doesn’t catch on that this is only partially true. “What if you lost control with whoever you were with? Did you ever think about what might happen if, say, you started healing without realising it?”  
  
Bertholdt looks vaguely affronted. “I’m not an amateur, Annie…”  
  
“We just can’t be too careful,” she insists lamely.  
  
“Okay.”  
  
A few more dishes later, Annie says, “There’s just one more thing.”  
  
Bertholdt groans, like he knew he’d seen this coming.  
  
“Tell me why you do it. I’m a part of it, you owe me this much.”  
  
A defeated breath wheezes through Bertholdt’s lips and Annie knows she’s finally gotten him. He accidentally drops another plate but makes no motion to pick it up.  
  
“You know the enormous pressure you feel right after you bite into your hand?” he begins falteringly. “Right before the Titan emerges. Like your skin is too small for you and every inch of you is on fire.”  
  
“I only ever feel cold,” Annie murmurs, but she does know what Bertholdt is referring to. The split second after the spike of her ring draws blood when she is suspended between human and monster, bursting at the seams with pure power. It sometimes feels like the Titan is literally blooming out from inside of her, unable to be contained within her tiny body, and the pressure, as Bertholdt mentioned, is overwhelming.  
  
“It’s like feeling like that but all the time,” he continues. “And it… it’s like, all… the… The stuff we do, it makes it stop.”  
  
Annie thinks about the times she’d felt the abstract urge to set herself on fire. Where Bertholdt had to battle the heat because it threatened to consume him, she sought it out to deliver her from the lethal, lonely cold. Same end, different means.  
  
There’s still one thing she doesn’t understand, though.  
  
“Why don’t you just punch yourself in the face or something then, if that’s what it takes?” she asks.  
  
“It… doesn’t work that way.”  
  
“No?”  
  
Bertholdt shakes his head slowly. “It has to be someone else or there’s no point. It’d be like… like having a prisoner who’s sentenced to hang just stick a rifle in his own mouth. There’s no punishment in a person pulling the trigger themselves. Letting someone else do this to me, it’s the only right thing I’ve ever done.”  
  
The ever-awakening organ within Annie’s ribcage convulses with sadness at the sheer conviction in Bertholdt’s voice that reveals how much he believes in his own words. How much he truly believes he deserves this.  
  
And maybe they do, after all that they’ve done, but it doesn’t make it hurt any less.  
  


* * *

  
Annie lays into him with a renewed fury, angered by how fucking pathetic he is, even though he isn’t, really, but she tells herself that if he’s so fucking self-obsessed as to think he’s worthless then she’ll show him what it really means to be nothing at all. Her belt strap raises a raw mountain range of welts on his back, his ass, the soles of his feet, and her kisses are all teeth.  
  


* * *

  
She kills the two Titans that they had been using as test subjects. It’s not like there were any groundbreaking discoveries about to be made or anything, but she figures it’s better safe than sorry, and when the military orders an inspection of everyone’s maneuver gear, she gets away with it by presenting them with the set that Bertholdt had unceremoniously shoved into her hands during Trost.  
  
“You never told me where you found it,” she says to him in a low voice as they’re leaving the inspection together.  
  
He seems to glance nervously around them to see if anyone is listening, and no one is within earshot but he still doesn’t answer.  
  
“Bertholdt,” Annie prods.  
  
“Some poor guy who was in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Bertholdt answers finally, and Annie doesn’t find out who he’s talking about until much later, when it’s too late, but then again, it always had been.  
  
In her dreams, they’re children again, and have all the second chances in the world.  
  


* * *

  
She’s protecting him, is what she reminds herself if ever she starts to feel that twinge of guilt welling up inside her. She’s keeping him from running off to some stranger who will hurt him for their own pleasure and not his relief, someone who won’t care enough to stay behind afterwards and just sit with him in silence until he stops shaking.  
  
She’s fucking him ruthlessly with three fingers, her ragged untrimmed nails drawing blood, she’s spitting in his face, she’s calling him an animal.  
  
She’s protecting him.  
  


* * *

  
The day before graduation, Bertholdt says to her, “So Reiner’s going to the Scouting Legion.”  
  
Annie figured as much.  
  
“And you?” she asks.  
  
Bertholdt doesn’t miss a beat. “I’m going with him.”  
  
Annie figured this much, too.  
  
“Where’d you choose to go if this-” she makes a vague gesture with her hand, as if she could encapsulate everything that was wrong in a single motion “-weren’t an issue?”  
  
“If I had the choice I wouldn’t be here at all,” Bertholdt replies with a small, sad laugh, and it scares Annie because she doesn’t know if he means he wouldn’t be here as in continuing with the mission or he wouldn’t be here as in anywhere at all.  
  
“Ugh, don’t say shit like that,” she snaps, easily passing her concern off as irritation.  
  
“Sorry.”  
  
“Don’t say sorry, either. God.”  
  
Bertholdt gives her a slightly wounded look. “Then… what do you want me to say?”  
  
“Whatever you  _want_  to say,” Annie blurts out frustratedly. “And not just because you think it’s what someone else wants to hear. I want you to speak up for yourself for once in your fucking life.”  
  
There is a heavy pause during which Bertholdt simply stares at her and Annie doesn’t meet his eyes, too mortified by her own outburst. This isn’t her. She doesn’t urge people to be  _better,_  she doesn’t feel any sympathy for weaklings or cowards, and she certainly,  _most certainly_  does not ever let her emotions get the better of her, because that is the single worst form of loss of control and she will not stand for it.  
  
Or so she thought.  
  
She ducks her head down even lower, her hair falling across her face to shield her eyes, and mumbles, “’m sorry.”  
  
Apologising is another thing that she does not do, but apparently she’s just breaking  _all_  the rules lately.  
  
Bertholdt gives her a little smile that she hears in his voice rather than sees when he says, “It’s okay.”  
  
She finally looks up at him and sees the smile growing, and she realises that he’s making fun of her. She doesn’t know for what, or even  _how_ exactly, but he is.  
  
“What’s so funny?” she demands suspiciously.  
  
“Oh, nothing,” Bertholdt says with exaggerated nonchalance, “It’s just cute when you get all sentimental, that’s all.”  
  
“…Go fuck yourself.”  
  


* * *

  
During Commander Erwin’s stupid speech, she turns and leaves her comrades behind without looking back.  
  
Life in the Military Police is tedious, to say the least. The people she now shares her days with are predictably insufferable, but it’s a relief to be alone again, except for the part where she’s lonely to the bone.  
  


* * *

  
She doesn’t see Bertholdt again for nearly a month, when he visits her in the interior to tell her what he knows about the 57th expedition beyond the walls. She pays her bunkmate to leave them alone for an hour, not missing the way Hitch leers at Bertholdt on her way out the door, eyeing him like he’s a prize to be won or land to be reclaimed from an enemy.  
  
They fall into bed before they do any talking, and she refuses to admit how much she’d missed this – the lean, coiled strength in his limbs, the almost whining moans that she gets a thrill out of being able to coax out of him, the flutter of his lashes when he comes. She uses their wayward hands and roaming lips as an excuse to search the length of his body for any evidence of how he’s been treating himself lately, even though she knows that he could have damn well lost an arm yesterday and she wouldn’t be able to tell. Still, the worst times were always when he wouldn’t let himself heal, and judging by the clean canvas of his skin and the easy fluidity of his movements, she chooses to believe that at least he had not reached that low of a point in recent days.  
  
The way they fuck today suggests otherwise, however. It is soured with a certain desperation that she hasn’t felt since she’d closed her hands around his throat in a burned-down house in Trost. She can tell he wants her to be cruel; he tries to provoke her into it by gripping her a little too tightly and even going so far as to scoff at her about the company she currently keeps. She means to be gentle, fully intending to refuse to take the bait, but somehow, whether through pure force of habit or something stronger and more sinister, she ends up falling for it just as she always has.  
  
Maybe she would have tried a little harder if she’d known that this would be the last time she would ever see him.  
  


* * *

  
She doesn’t know why she spares Armin.  
  
It’s just that, as she knelt there with the hood of his Scouting Legion cloak pinched between her thumb and forefinger, seeing that she’s staring into wide blue eyes instead of a furious green, all she can think about is the day of the maneuver gear inspection, when he had accused her of being kind. Of course, it wasn’t supposed to be an accusation; it was supposed to be a compliment, but she’d felt horribly naked all of a sudden, caught red-handed committing some heinous crime – the unforgivable sin of weakness.  
  
Armin had her pegged all wrong, though. He’d insisted that she must have her own noble reasons for wanting to join the Military Police, and hadn’t seemed to believe her when she brusquely replied that she just wanted to save her own skin. He’s always tried to see the best in people regardless of whatever overwhelming evidence to the contrary they might present. Annie is simultaneously envious of and disgusted by this ability of his – how nice it must be, to not automatically assume the worst of everyone you meet, but how naïve and foolish, also.  
  
So when he had continued to believe that there was some good in Annie despite everything she’s ever said or done or been, she always thought it’d get him in trouble one day. She never could have imagined that it would turn out to be the other way around – saving his life, and dooming hers.  
  
Other members of the Scouting Legion are not so lucky, however. She squashes them underfoot, pinwheels them into oblivion, hurls them to the ground. Their bodies crunch and burst and rip and she feels no remorse. It’s nothing personal; it’s simply about survival. If she could get what she needs without taking any lives, she would do it in a heartbeat, but they are the ones who have made it impossible.  _They_  came after  _her,_  proving themselves to truly be the enemy that she had almost been foolish enough to give the benefit of the doubt, and she feels a certain gleeful sense of superiority from the fact that they were ultimately unable to keep their true nature hidden from her.  
  
Her father was right all along.  
  
And yet, as hundreds of hooks bury themselves deep in her flesh and Captain Levi is threatening to cut off all her limbs, there is still a part of her that thinks she deserves it, which means that Bertholdt was right all along, too.  
  
In her dreams, they are children again, though it’s really for the first time, since they’d never yet had the chance.  
  


* * *

  
When she’s finally caught, all she can feel is relief.  
  
Even through the shame, the humiliation of her failure, knowing she is a bad daughter and a worse warrior, and even through the guilt she can’t help but to feel when she sees how her betrayal has left her former friends and comrades reeling, she is so utterly, thoroughly, overwhelmingly  _relieved._  The hunt is over. The lies can stop because she’s revealed what a despicable breed of human being she is, if she can even be called that at all.  
  
Her last thoughts are of Bertholdt and Reiner and the mountains of their village. She wonders if they are still warriors, and if the mountains are still topped with snowcaps. She wonders if Reiner has forgotten again yet, and if Bertholdt is in someone else’s bed right now because he can’t make himself forget as easily as Reiner does. Whatever has become of them, she hopes they will get to go home. Be children again.  
  
Suspended in her cold, cold crystal, Annie does not dream at all.


End file.
